Tag Archives: remodeling

Spring started on schedule a few weeks ago. Forty and fifty-degree temperatures started to melt the backlog of winter snow and show a peek of grass, ready to sprout green again.

The thing we’re discovering about New England winters is that they seem to start late and last longer. Today – the first official day of Spring – brought 12 fresh inches of snow on top of the melting plowed heaps clinging to the side of our driveway.

Of course, we got the Spring-project itch a few weekends ago and even spent some time outside working in the barn in the downright balmy 40-degree temps. We tore down plastic, swept up the hayloft, used our handy barn magnet to draw up old nails, and (don’t try this at home, kids) used the blower to blast the cobwebs and dust down the aisle. It sounds so much tamer and manageable than it actually was … seriously, I had to throw out my contacts afterwards — it was a veritable dirt/dust/cobweb/mouse poop hurricane.

It was nice, though, to work on some of the little aesthetic changes to the barn, too. We hung up cross-ties for the horses, mounted water buckets, painted a chalkboard to hang above the countertop we put up in the little ‘feed center’ comprised of an old countertop from my parents’ house. Things like this start making the whole vision come together. I can almost see little Finny’s head hanging out of his stall nickering for a treat.

:::

Impatient after a winter of hearing nothing from our neighbor-excavator who we had chatted with last September about putting in an arena, Jed finally picked up the phone to the Son (of the Father-Son operation) and asked if we were on ‘the list’…

He said YES and offered to come out with his Dad to review the property and our arena plans. We hoped very much that we hadn’t crossed some sacred dad-son business line by throwing someone under the bus who hadn’t communicated effectively, but DUDE, we need to know whether or not this ring can be put in where we’d hoped — especially before we spent time soliciting neighborly help to pound in fence posts. So. Good to have that squared away. Now we just need the ground to dry up enough to get a dump truck in.

:::

We also got in touch with our trusty Chimney guy who had also been a stone mason in a former life. We have a major patio/yard project we’ve been hoping to accomplish for awhile now and plan on finally tackling this Spring. Mostly, we’re needing the unsightly rock-slide off our little back ‘yard’ to be built up with a real retaining wall. We’ll add in a bunch of fill to nearly double our ‘yard’ space, level and grade it, and cut a real rock ‘staircase’ into the hill. Some of my ideas and inspirations are posted here, if you’re interested.

:::

And just before the snow fell on Monday, we got our new furniture delivered over the weekend. More photos to come, I promise, but in short – we LOVE IT. This is our first ever REAL (non-Ikea, non-Craigslist, non-hand-me-down) couch and chair. Ours is the Zoe model from Four Seasons. We got all crazy and went with a white couch. I know.. I KNOW(!)… but it’s slip-covered, and it’s washable, and it’s gorgeous. We also got an oversized wingback chair from Hallagan furniture with a matching storage ottoman. The chair is so incredibly large and comfy, it’s awesome. The ottoman we’ve been pulling up to the couch and using it as a little foot-extension/chaise.

Having such awesomely comfortable and FULL size furniture has been great, especially during Stomach Flu-palooza 2013, which hit me Sunday night. A decent portion of Monday was spent passed out on the couch (in between sipping ginger ale and dragging myself to the workshop to finish orders due out … seriously… what was I thinking?) With room enough for me, 3 blankets and 2 dogs — it was great.

Until about a month ago, this room — fairly removed from the rest of the house — was filled with things still unpacked from our move.

It’s a downstairs bedroom, but since we decided to make our bedroom upstairs, next to the bathroom and the closet, it stood empty. (Interestingly, it’s also the only room in the house that still has the original windows. When the window replacement guys came to measure, the door was shut to this part of the house, and they never got ordered. Actually, I kinda of like it this way, and plan to not replace them — love the white natural light we get in here… remember this?)

The past few weeks, we prepped this room to be my new workshop. I’d previously been working in a corner of the library– which is one of my favorite rooms in the house– but facing a corner and getting pieces of metal and steel wool everywhere kept the room perpetually cluttery and dirty. And most of all, I needed a place I could shut the door and be done with it.

Here’s the new space!

The work center is made of in-stock Lowe’s cabinets (we got them at a 20% off sale), Ikea laminate counters, and Ikea curtains. The paint is Valspar’s Maine Coast (not white!!), and the birch table support is from the property (and matches the drapes and shop header quite nicely, if I do say so myself.)

We’ve since moved a chair in here so Jed can work on his laptop and the pups can look out the window. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for a hard-wearing rug that might look good on the floor and keep the acoustics a bit less echo-y, as well as wall art to spruce up the blank spaces.

It’s so great to have a place for everything in here, and when I clean it up — it actually looks clean and organized! It’s amazing what a real, organized space can do for your work.

While the past two weeks around here have been filled day and night with anxiety-filled horse planning, visits, budget-checking, and test riding – we didn’t want to neglect a major house improvement that was just waiting to happen – refinishing the floors!

Last Friday, Jed ran over to Home Depot to rent a floor sander (We went with the USand orbital sander, which was apparently ‘less aggressive’ than the typical belt sander). He started with 24 grit sandpaper to take off the stain, which worked fairly well, save the corners and edges of our old pine boards, which have slight bends/cups in them from all their years of use.

For those sections, we tag teamed with 40 grit sandpaper on the mouse sander and handheld orbital sander.

After two days of sanding with pretty aggressive grits, it was time to do the finish sanding by hand (we returned the machine so as not to incur an additional fee) with 80 and then 120 grit paper. I did 3 passes over the floor with 80, and then one with 120.

You can see the difference between the original dark stain, still in the kitchen (and covered in a huge layer of sawdust, but you get the idea), and the new raw pine in the dining room. The pine, even being ‘old growth’ and very hard, had some spirally-swirl marks in it from the large orbital sander, so in the successive 80 grit passes, I worked hard to get many of them out.

I really like the light wood. The yellowy/honey pine tone is not my style though, so I needed to find some stain that would compliment those bleached barn beams, all while being just a shade lighter. I want to err on the lighter side in these rooms, as they are a bit darker, in the North and East side of the house.

I turned to my two favorite stain colors: Rustoleum’s Sunbleached and Minwax’s Provincial.

And because I wanted the floor to look like rustic barn wood, rather than ‘stained’ wood, I decided to make a little ‘wash’ mixing about 50% odorless mineral spirits (to thin the stain), 40% Sunbleached, and 10% Provincial (which actually is much less red than the ‘swatch’ on the can looks).

The result looked like this:

I’m really digging the way they look. Not to gray, not to brown. There are hints of blue-ish and green-ish tones that are picked up, but nothing crazy or overt. When Jed walked in, he said – “Oh! They look beige!” Whatever.

You can see them here next to the unfinished wood, and the threshold, which must be oak, as it was naturally darker than the pine. Also, we need to wash our walls down, as the room has apparently changed colors!